Diamonds and Roses, Vipers and Toads follows mistreated Gwendolyn Honeydale as a magical gift turns her voice into a source of beauty, desire, and danger, while her cruel sister’s curse exposes the costs of envy, family cruelty, and being seen. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?

I’ve always been fascinated by fairy tales and folklore, and as a child I was particularly haunted by Diamonds and Toads by Charles Perrault. It’s a surprisingly short story, sparse on details, and only one of the characters, Fanny, has a name. She receives a brutally unfair punishment: to spew vipers and toads whenever she speaks. What was the fairy’s motivation for cursing her so cruelly?

That led to questions about fairies themselves: Who are they? How do they live, and where? What is the source of their magic? I also wanted to answer a question raised in Cinderella: How did Cinderella come to have a fairy godmother?

Gwendolyn’s gift seems beautiful at first, but it also makes her vulnerable to exploitation. How did you approach that tension?

One of the things I wanted to know after the end of this fairy tale was what life would be like for a farm girl suddenly elevated to princess and future queen. How would she adjust? Would she really be comfortable living in a palace governed by strange and rigid protocols? How would she interact with nobles and officials who might look down on her as a commoner?

Surely, she would become a target for anyone who saw her as a diamond mine. As I was writing Gwen, I thought about Lady Diana Spencer, who, despite her aristocratic background, was not prepared for life as a princess and did not marry a man who truly loved her. I also thought about families whose lives were worsened after winning the lottery—people who ended up battling one another and being exploited by opportunists.

The glassmaking scenes give the novel a strong sense of craft and longing. Why was that world important to Gwen’s journey?

Gwen is in the marketplace when she witnesses the arrival of glassmakers from a distant land. They have brought something colorful and exotic that seems almost magical in her drab world. The young man to whom she is attracted has dedicated his life to creating beauty, and through him Gwen comes to recognize her own desires and begins to see who she truly is.

The transformation of sand by fire into a beautiful vessel symbolizes the transformation she longs for in her own life.

The book mixes grotesque magic with emotional realism. How did you balance fairy-tale logic with the darker adult themes of the story?

My Antasy series is science fiction, and I was rigorous about the scientific aspects of those novels. When writing Diamonds and Roses, Vipers and Toads, I knew it would be fun to indulge in the liberties of magic, but I was equally determined that there had to be rules and limitations. It’s boring when heroes face an extreme threat and the problem is solved by a wizard with a simple wave of a staff.

The world of the characters in my novel is rooted in history and the real conditions of life in Britain at the dawn of the Renaissance. Life was far more difficult then for most people—even for royalty—and especially for women. Women had little power and little control over their own lives.

Witches and fairies, in the popular imagination, were women who possessed power, making them both appealing and frightening. For the most part, they were imagined as beings who rejected men and gloried in sisterhood. This novel would have lacked substance if it did not depict the realities of a time when medicine was primitive, plagues and famine were a problem, warfare was constant and a woman was often regarded as the property of her father or husband.

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